Asking whether Labour will learn the lessons is like asking if they will really give power back to the people: i.e. the answer is a very obvious no.

Try again. Do not pass go, do not collect £200 of my tax money, etc

4. What policie represent “labour Values”-

1. Maximising the number of middle class and white collar bureaucrats by the government.
2. Making government as complex as possible in order to achieve 1.
3. Ensure the first priority of eduation is to satisfy the demands of those who work in it.

Things “the government could just get on and do”: reduce child poverty. Because it’s THAT easy.

No wonder Labour is so moribund if its members are as delusional as Don Paskini.

You can’t spend 1

No wonder Labour is so moribund if its members are as delusional as Don Paskini.

You can’t spend 12 years actively destroying the things you believe in, i.e. planning to renew Trident, bring in ID cards, let child poverty increase to the extent that 1 in 3 kids live on or below the breadline, privatise the post office, and effectively raise taxes for the lower classes, and then hope in 1 lame duck year you can just reverse all of these things.

That isn’t how it works.

Then again, you’re oddball enough to remain a member of a party that thinks you are a dinosaur, and which has, in government, trashed your beliefs. No wonder you think you can offer up this sad laundry list of things that this government will never do.

Perhaps explain to the public how hiring an additional 100,000 tutors to teach failing kids squares with 12 years of “education, education, education”.

Please explain, clearly, WHY SCHOOLS ARE NOT DOING THE JOB in the first place? Could it be that schools are now run for the benefit of the education establishment and not for the children?

Do our ministers not understand that new “initiatives” such as this one starkly underline a total failure in core policy? It’s like saying “look, sticking plaster, aren’t we great????”.

Let’s be clear. The leadership sucks. There’s just no point in asking the question at all until they’ve gone.

The answer is no, Labour CANNOT learn their lessons.

When you look at a selection of their most toxic decisions, and you look at them one after the other you realise that the depths they plunged under Blair and Brown are not a slip, a lapse or a coincidence.

Blair’s control freakery since he took over meant that he depleted the party of a healthy internal dialectic. At best you have conspiracies and plots a-la Purnell. The old debate left/centre-left over policies and values is now merely a question of who’s the most charismatic, Gordon Brown or Alan Johnson.

That’s a nice selection of Greatest Hits you got there, Claude. You’ve left off all the anti-immigrant stuff and so-called anti-terror laws – but I guess they deserve a mix tape all of their own.

I don’t understand how anyone can be a member of a party who in government has done all of those things. They can say they disagree with the leadership but what have they done to reign the leadership in? If there isn’t anything they can do to reign the leadership in, why are they still in it?

I can *kind of* understand people who are in their 30s or 40s, who would’ve joined in the Thatcher years and spent up to 10-15 years in the party before Blair started showing his nasty face in government. But anyone who was a young person, teenager or young adult when we went to war in Iraq and all the rest of this shit followed (not to mention the dodgy crap that happened beforehand)? There is no excuse. You start off with principle, and then you try to get power. If you start off trying to get power, if and when you get it, you can’t just whip out your principles from nowhere.

Denim, am I wrong in thinking that “1 in 3 kids are living on or below the bread line” because poorer people tend to have more children then middle or upper class – so its not really Labour’s issue but a natural state?

This is the UK, not a village in Rwanda. Poor people may have more kids in general but not so many as to distort statistics for child poverty. The stereotypical estate-dwelling single young mums (not too many of those but you seem the type to believe in them) might want a kid to get some benefits in, but too many means their money will be spent feeding them all.

Living on or below the breadline is actually a lot poorer than whatever level of poverty you might have already imagined, because you seem dismissive and unconcerned about it. Here are some facts:

http://www.endchildpoverty.org.uk/why-end-child-poverty/key-facts

Thanks for comments (and for the avoidance of doubt, this is a discussion which I do want to open up to the liberal-left more widely as well as Labour supporters).

Just quickly – child poverty is lower than in 1997 (denim justice appears to suggest it is higher), and it could be reduced further, given political will. http://www.ecpc.org.uk for more info and ideas about this. It’s not a “natural state” as liliput suggests.

On education – hiring additional tutors sounds to me like a good idea and I’m a bit confused about this idea of education policy just serving the educational establishment. It’s not what the stats say and it’s not been my experience as a school governor, which both show things getting better in most places and for most kids, but some areas where it is not working as well and some who need more help and support. But any data or experiences which contradict that, do share.

‘taxes for the lower classes’ – direct taxes are lower now for low income earners than in 1997, and there are more in work benefits available, so I’m a bit at a loss about this one. Are you saying that the increase in indirect taxes have meant that overall taxes are higher? Be interested to see evidence for that claim.

I’ll come back to Claude at 7 and denim justice at 9 later.

I think I’ve said this on Don’s blog before, but I think a problem is that – perhaps natrually to a degree – Labour Party people have a for a long time been very, very defensive when their party has been criticised from without and have therefore tended to shout down the critics – thus enabling the political and democratic degeneration of their party and their government to continue unabated. Meanwhile the only voices that have been listened to have been voices from the Party’s Right – a smaller and smaller space, I have to say – which is probably pragmatic enough in one sense, but is a policy whose production diminshing returns must now be obvious to everybody.

Now it is surely time – rather, many years overdue – to listen as equals to all the voters and members that the Labour Party has lost and ask how they can be got back. I cannot see how the Party can in any way be saved or resuscitated without some kind of return to Labour values – and if that brings down a storm of media criticism then well let it . The Blairites won’t like it because their central preoccupation is to never be on the wrong side of the media, but the Blairites are all going to jump ship for the business (and political) careers after the election anyway, so who cares?

I recommend this from the estimable Professor McKibbin as absolutely essentially reading. Right now the only reason anybody gives a stuff whether or not Labour loses is because of the Tories. And that’s no longer enough to win with, let alone to do anything about the takeover of the Party by cynics and chancers. You’re drowning, Don, there’s no land in sight whatsoever and you need to pick a direction to swim right now and start swimming hard.

(Oh yeah, meant to say before. There was a good comment on Chris Brooke’s blog, which I know Don reads, to the effect that in older days something like the expenses scandal would have been followed by a wave of threatened deselections. This was before it proved impossible even to get rid of the nauseous Hazel. There is no Labour Party democracy any more.)

Denim, I do come from Africa hence my perception of poverty is slightly biased to the point where I don’t believe there is poverty in the UK. However poor a family is – single or couple, they always have a roof over their heads, access to healthcare, education, food and flat screen TVs. This is not poverty in a true sense – its relative poverty – which I suppose is psychologically harmful but noone is starving to death in the UK!

Flat screen TVs? Are you so deluded? I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never had a flat screen TV nor do I own one! Are you the daughter of some kind of former landowner from Zimbabwe who was kicked out by Mugabe, hence your sneering at the idea that there are people in the UK whose lives are completely impoverished despite whatever the welfare state technically offers?

Have you ever been to Britain and seen people on the streets? Have you heard of kids abused in care homes? You’re either a walking sneer to the poor people of the UK, and a wanker who buys into the idea that anyone who is poor in the UK is just lazy because we are better off than Africa; or you’re taking the piss.

*I meant to say, nor do I know anyone who owns one

Denim, I’ve lived here for 7 years and if you don’t know anyone that owns a flat screen TV – then buddy you have to leave your room – there is a whole wide world out there you’re missing out on!

Well, a whole wide screen, anyway.

The point is not the “wide flat screen TV”.
The point is that many may have managed to get hold of one…but at what cost?

One thing that was quickly swept under the carpet as the credit crisis kicked off big time was the issue of family debt. We don;t like to talk about it, do we?

Labour don;t like to talk about the fact that they presided over the biggest (by far) piling up of private debt in history and the Tories can;t either because their best mates made quazillions out of people defaulting on their loans and credit cards.

For years, low wages and crap jobs in the UK were concealed by credit thrown at people like sweets in a playground. People on the dole, part-time workers, casuals, people who’d already amassed 7 credit cards from different companies. They were all generously given the chance to grab hold of big fuck off TVs, hi-fis and playstations. Many though had to routinely use their VISA and Mastercard to go to the dentist or to do basic shopping. Credit with stupid APR became a new form of welfare.

Trouble is…the chicken was always going to come home to roost.

In 2006 The Independent wrote that we were in front of a ticking time bomb. The UK alone comprised 2/3 (two-thirds) of all EU private debt.

What happened was…record numbers were made bankrupt year after year and this is somehting the press rarely talks about. Hundreds of thousands of people in Britain are financially ruined. They are poor. They may have a flat screen TV to make you think otherwise, but they can’t make it til the end of the month.

If you deny this, then it;s probably because you attend “dinner parties” a-la Tasmin Alibhai Brown.

I’ve just read this monumentally shite piece by the editor of LabourList (no, not Dolly):

So for self-confessed progressives, there can be no more protest at the ballot box: a vote for any other party in the next general election is a vote for a Tory government. Would our angry readers and those at Liberal Conspiracy prefer that? I somehow doubt it.

No, the only alternative for the disillusioned is to grasp the nettle and express discontentment by reshaping the Labour Party in the form they want it from within. Anything else is frankly lazy.

What a pillock. If I ever saw him, I’d shout spittle-flecked abuse in his stupid face. I can’t be bothered to register for a useless LabourList account so I’ll fisk his shit here:

Where to start? For one thing, there are areas where voting for Labour would actually let the Tories in. Liberal/Tory marginals for one – and whilst people might question some of the Lib Dems’ rhetoric or record in local government, compared to Labour they are so progressive it’s not even funny. So there’s that straw man knocked down and burnt to a cinder.

The only alternative.. to join Labour and try and change it from the inside? Because that’s worked really well, hasn’t it? Progressives should join a party that has pissed on everything they hold dear. And has stifled its own internal democracy, preventing any meaningful change from within. Riiiight….

And the only thing that’s “frankly lazy” with Alex Smith’s argument is the “intellect” that has gone into such a ramshackle attack on non-Labour progressives.

Beaten wives’ syndrome, thy name is Labour membership.

Claude, if and when these credit strapped people go bankrupt, the state takes over and makes sure they have everything they need. They are never destitute. I agree – they are poor relative to those that aren’t bankrupt – but they are not starving.

A poor person does not have access to a credit card that they can use to buy a flat screen TV – what is hard about that to understand?

Lilliput, you need an update.
Poverty in 2009 is obviously not the same as in 1825. Once we’ve re-stated the obvious then, you need to move on and look around and accept that it’s not all hunky dory. The task of a left-wing party, in my humble view, is exactly that of never forgetting those left behind. For a million reasons.

They could but I don’t see it happening while they’re in power. Parties can’t renew in government, they need a period of opposition to reflect and find ways of moving forward…

A majoe reason for poverty was that our unskilled and semiskilled industries were overmanned. When computers and electronic control systems were developed, large swathes of the UK industry collapsed. The problems in the Uk were worse than in W Germany , in part because of over -manning. We have a large uneducated and unskilled populace who lack the ability and at times the will, to obtain the skills required to work in advances high value industries. The massive increase in the income of those in the financial sector creates an average which is high. If people are to escape povertry they need to obtain a good education, combined with skills to obtain work in advanced high value industries. With the present tax rate, an unskilled labourer with 3 children is better off staying on benefits . Low skills and education, tax on those earning less than £15k/yr and the present benefits system combine to keep people below the poverty line( 60% of average income) .

Don,

Let’s just assume that, we can leave the questions of relative and absolute poverty to one side and accept that, although poverty today is not as ghastly as it was in – say – Dickens’ London, or other parts of the world today, it is still pretty bad. We would all rather children did not grow up below the poverty line – even John Redwood doesn’t actually like child poverty.

The fact is that ending child poverty is every bit as noble and as witless a policy ambition as world peace or universal brotherly love. For a political party to say they want these things and to make a manifesto promise of them is meaningless because we all want them. The interesting bit is the bit we disagree about – how it can best be achieved. And on that subject Labour is every bit as bereft of ideas as the Tories.

The ECPN website seems very keen to “raise awareness” of poverty and its ills but it is frankly rather patronising to be told that poverty is bad – we all know that – what I want to know is what you think should be done about it. Here ECPN is strangely silent.

ECPN welcomes the decision to create a statutory duty for public bodies to do what they can to end child poverty, but they don’t exactly spell out what that is. They welcome the retention of Ed Balls as Children’s Secretary (?) because he is committed to the Child Poverty agenda but they say precisely bog all about what that commitment entails. Which bit of Ed Ball’s tenure as children’s secretary did they like? Was there no-one else who shares these views? Are there really ministers in this Government who don’t want to eradicate poverty and who would not seek to eradicate child poverty if made children’s minister? If there are then we certainly ought to be told, don’t you think?

As far as I understand it, the government’s policy on the eradication of child poverty focusses rather heavily on redistribution. It is by no means certain however, that this is the best way of ending child poverty. The widespread use of benefits to address poverty might in fact exacerbate existing class divisions and thus damage poorer children’s life chances relative to other policy approaches. There is a large (though not necessarily correct) school of thought in America that holds that poorly designed welfare policies in the seventies did lasting damage to a generation of black families. I stress that I don’t know whether this is true or not but it is a debate that you need to have when you talk about eradicating poverty.

Perhaps a much higher minimum wage would be better – or a change to the income tax threshold such that you don’t pay income tax until you are earning a (regionally adjusted) living wage. Perhaps that would do a great deal to eradicate child poverty but, on the other hand, it might so blight British competitiveness as to increase child poverty.

Perhaps men should be pursued far more vigorously for maintenance payments, perhaps divorces should be harder to obtain, perhaps more children should be taken from their parents and taken into care or adopted – perhaps fewer should be. Sure Start represents an enormous benefit to poor children and I understand it to be one of the Government’s more successful initiatives but, since it doesn’t necessarily make children better off (in terms of the household incomes that define poverty) might it be cut to pay for measures that do contribute towards the 2020 target?

The idea that, after all this time in power the government still has tricks up its sleeve, that it could wave a magic wand and reduce poverty by sheer force of will is fantastical to the point of idiocy. If the government’s policies on child poverty were ever going to work then it was surely during the recent economic boom. Now the boom has ended, the public finances are in a mess, the UK’s two biggest industries are humbled, the credit card companies want their money back and so on. Poverty is going to get much worse before it gets better.

Hi George,

Lots of work has been done on reducing child poverty and in answer to the questions that you raise, which I absolutely agree need to be discussed – a good place to start is with http://www.jrf.org.uk/work/workarea/child-poverty

Eradicating child poverty (by which the government means reducing poverty to below 5% as in some Scandinavian countries) is very challenging, but one of the very interesting things about the research is that significant reductions in child poverty are much easier to achieve then many people would think – for example, it would take just 0.3% of GDP to halve child poverty compared to 1997. So I don’t think it is “fantastical to the point of idiocy” to suggest that the government takes action on this.

Also agree entirely with Claude @ 19, one of the problems with the economy is that too much of the wealth went to those at the top, and prosperity for middle and lower earners was based on borrowing money rather than higher wages.

Only a technocrat thinks government has all the answers and that it is just a matter of tweaking the tax and spend policies it controls.

Labour will struggle to learn any lessons while the underlying leadership philosophy remains that of Fabianism because the Fabians have yet to demonstrate that they have ever made any mistakes.

I hope Sunder Katwala perks up on this thread because he has a lot to answer for personally.

“Now it is surely time – rather, many years overdue – to listen as equals to all the voters and members that the Labour Party has lost and ask how they can be got back. I cannot see how the Party can in any way be saved or resuscitated without some kind of return to Labour values – and if that brings down a storm of media criticism then well let it .”

Agree with all of this, and disagree with Alex Smith’s article which denim justice mentioned – I think at this stage the argument “if you don’t vote Labour you will just let the Tories in” just serves to annoy liberal-lefties and Labour needs to come up with something rather better.

“I don’t understand how anyone can be a member of a party who in government has done all of those things. They can say they disagree with the leadership but what have they done to reign the leadership in?”

Since I wrote my article last night, the government has announced loads more money to build council houses and that they are delayed plans to privatise the post office. So that’s 2 out of 5 of my wishlist, and just waiting on the announcements about child poverty, redistribution and ID cards

Just on your last point, Dan, it looks like you may have 3 out of 5. ID cards appear to have been quietly kicked into the long grass, with development contracts left untendered. http://www.bickerstafferecord.org.uk/?p=991

Mind you, child poverty and redistribution are the trickier ones.

Was today’s announcement ‘new’ money or new ‘new’ money? And is ‘kicking ID cards into the long grass’ because they know it’s economic madness and a vote loser or because they now recognise the serious objections?

With Labour’s track record I’m not convinced that any of those requirements have been met.

With every relaunch Brown gives us just a ‘new’ rhetorical commitment to change – it’s getting very old.

Only a technocrat thinks government has all the answers and that it is just a matter of tweaking the tax and spend policies it controls.

If not the government then who exactly? I know statism isn’t exactly political flavour of the month at the moment but what body other than the state is going to set about the task of eradicating poverty?

Donpaskini,

Isn’t there a very low birthrate in Scandinavian counties? Does that not make a difference?

Don,

I have lots of time for the JRF but, even on their website, detail is rather lacking. Nonetheless, the gist seems to be that:

*It should be easier for parents to work (provision of better childcare would help)
*In work poverty should be reduced (i.e. wages or income support increased)
*Benefits should be increased for people who can’t work.

I think that is a fair summary.

I certainly agree that good childcare is an excellent policy and, inasmuch as it allows people to work who might not otherwise be able to do so, it even pays for itself but, the fact is that unemployment is now rising. Even in this boom years, the government was far better at creating public sector jobs than private sector ones. So, it’s all very well calling for increased access to employment but, if the economy is in the tank, it still won’t get people out of poverty because there aren’t any jobs for them to access. Moreover, if getting people into work is the key to getting them out of poverty then you have to ask what proportion of the 600,000 children lifted out of poverty in the ten years to 2006 would have been removed from poverty simply because of a long global boom – as opposed to those who benefited solely as a result of policy – surely a substantial number.

Once parents are in work, there are two ways to reduce in-work poverty. One is to raise wages and the other is to increase tax credits (or other income support system). As regards the first, the Government deserves credit for introducing the minimum wage but, since earning the minimum wage would leave a household below the poverty line, you have to ask whether it is any more than cosmetic. On the other hand, raise the minimum wage to a point where it would pay for a decent standard of living (which would have to be either regionally determined or grossly unfair) and you risk increasing unemployment still further and thereby chucking your entire anti-poverty strategy out of the window.

This is why the Prime Minister’s big anti-poverty idea was tax credits. But Tax Credits don’t generate new, poverty-busting wealth, they merely take money from some people and give it to others (assuming there are no cock ups, of which there were, in fact many) and in order to take money off one lot of people and give it to another lot you have to have some people earning a huge amount of money or paying vast corporation tax.

And the problem with that is that, it means you are entirely beholden to the bits of the population and the bits of the economy who pay more tax than they consume. As it happened, the sheer scale of the government’s redistribution and “investment” ambitions forced them into ever closer cahoots with the one bit of the economy that could generate sufficient cash to pay for it all – the City. Remember Mandleson’s “intensely relaxed” comment – he wasn’t intensely relaxed at all – he was absolutely desperate for people to get filthy rich.

So, it isn’t enough to say that Labour’s anti-poverty strategy over the last ten years has been based largely on redistribution – to really explain it you have to acknowledge the full Faustian quality of the policy – which was to unleash hyper capitalism in order to pay for a form of socialism. It is important to recognise that this is massively different from traditional social democracy of the type practiced in other parts of Europe.

The best you can say about this approach is that is is a zero sum game. But, in fact, it is only as good as that if you assume that income from all sources are politically and morally identical. There are probably many on this site who would argue that tax income generated from a rapacious financial services sector which generated it by driving a housing bubble and funding private equity takeovers that allowed rent seeking bosses to extract the surplus of their employees future labour today, is more morally troublesome than tax income generated by a company that makes, say, roofing insulation or replacement hoover bags. There may also be some who think that there is a difference between earning money to support your own family and being given benefits in order to compensate you for the way the market is rigged against you. I happen to believe both are true.

My point is that another poverty strategy was possible.

Brown used to say that, because of Tax Credits, a household with two children on the median income (about £24,000 at the time I think) paid, in effect, no income tax. He appears not to have thought it strange that he presided over a system whereby an average sized family with an average income needed substantial benefits in order to live a decent life. That the average household should receive about the same amount in benefits that it paid in tax did not appear to him to be a hilarious indictment of his loss of clarity; the Swiftian nature of this situation was not apparent to him. He actually boasted about it in two successive budgets

If, instead of micromanaging household budgets, he had concentrated his efforts on making sure that it was possible for a household on a moderate income to stand on its own two feet (getting a proper handle on the housing market would have really helped here) instead of forcing it to rely on his own largesse, he might have reinforced the incentive to work. By unwinding the tax/benefit nexus, he could have unsprung some of the benefit traps that keep families in poverty. By acting to restrain house price inflation he could have prevented a yawning chasm from opening in the national distribution of wealth and funnelled the wealth created by the boom into investment, research, plant and the generation of more wealth rather than ever more absurd prices for the same piles of Victorian brick.

Without the need for quite so much redistribution, we certainly wouldn’t have had the ferocity of rhetoric about benefit scroungers which causes social services to view with suspicion the very people they are supposed to serve. We might not even have needed so much revenue from the city in order to have paid for it – so we might have been able to regulate it according to common sense rather than income maximisation. That, in turn might have lead us to a policy environment which supported a wider range of industries across a wider chunk of the country than the obsessive concern with London and the Square Mile. That might have reduced the North South divide. And so on, ad nauseam

I have gone on far longer than I intended. I shall summarise

The premise of a campaign against child poverty is wrong. Child poverty is not the product of Governmental indifference or the lack of a specific policy designed to reduce it. Child poverty exists at its present level because a wide range of policies across economics, housing, education, social policy, crime and everything else are not as good as they could be. The number of people in poverty is, if you like, the Government’s score card – not on poverty – on everything. The number of children in poverty at the end of Labour’s tenure is lower now. But the bursting of the bubble may yet return us to the status quo ante. On that basis, the Government scores pretty poorly.

Labout has spent ten years in the most favourable conditions imaginable trying to fix poverty using poverty policy, it has failed because the answer to poverty is not a better poverty policy but better policies on everything else. Labour does not know what those policies are and it is now seeking re-election on a platform of lying about the state of the public finances and the mess it has made of them.

The Government’s financial bankruptcy is plain to see – its intellectual bankruptcy scarcely less so. But its moral delinquency is, only now beginning to emerge – that is has so suppressed internal debate, both within and without the party that, as we contemplate the ruin of the intellectual paradigm of the last ten years, there is no alternative school of progressive thought ready to step into the breach.

Screw the lot of them

@ 32. Belive it or not the idea that the state has a role in eradicating poverty is relatively new (in the uk, 1946). Before that, the extended family, charity, the church and philanthropy were the main means of “social security”. The state has never been particularly effective at eradicating poverty and in an an increasingly diverse society the case for their involvment is ever weaker in my view. I give you the following disadvantages.

The state cannot know who is in poverty. Someone on 12k, living at home with their parents is realtively comfortable, a single parent on the same money with 4 kids is not.

Diminishing marginal returns. The state inevitably grows and consumes more resources trying to alleviate poverty, however beyond a certain point (we passed this point decades ago) every £ spent on welfare is less and less effective at reducing poverty.

Because the state is permament, any state interventions run the risk of creating dependancy and increasing, or at best perpetuating poverty.

George V, marvellous post. Look, people, THIS is the far better explained background to my continuous harping on about lowering taxes for the low-paid.

Oh, absolute nonsense. Poverty was enormously reduced after the war and such things as available housing, national insurance and so on made a huge difference. You really are taking facts from your imagination rather than reality.

As for dependency – the welfare state reduced depndency because itmeant people n o longer had to come creepign to charities and poorhouses for a roof over their heads and enormough money in their pocket for food. It actually liberated them from that process. Do you imagine that before the welfare state came in, people who subsequently lived in council houses had been – lacking the dependency culture – living in three-bedroom houses? No. They were dependent on private charity, such as it was.

You know absolutely nothing about the subjects on which you’re pontificating. Nothing from experience and nothing from the real world. It’s all theory and fantasy.

Gerorge V – That’s the best post I’ve read on the subject, and quite probably on LC, ever.

that is has so suppressed internal debate, both within and without the party

How would they have achieved the latter?

Incidentally, with regards to thomas’ comment, I note a “senior govt official” in the FT has suggested that the govt has “a fixation on producing endless policy documents—a total lack of interest in delivery”. (Quoted by Clegg, via LDV)

Interestingly, this is precisely what was said at a north west region third sector bods meeting I sat in about two months ago, expressed if anything even better – something like: “a touching belief that a 60 page PDF fixes the problem all by itself.”

“As for dependency – the welfare state reduced depndency because itmeant people n o longer had to come creepign to charities and poorhouses for a roof over their heads and enormough money in their pocket for food. It actually liberated them from that process. Do you imagine that before the welfare state came in, people who subsequently lived in council houses had been – lacking the dependency culture – living in three-bedroom houses? No. They were dependent on private charity, such as it was”.

The state replaced the previous social systems, yes, but where is the evidence that they are more effective i.e if that amount of money had been spent by bodies other than the state would they have been more efficient at using it ?

By your own admission, all that’s happened is they’ve been “Liberated” them from one form of dependency to another. I’d rather be reliant on my local vicar who probably knew me and my family all his life than some faceless (and very expensive) dogma driven bureacrat on a job centre plus helpline.

I’ll ignore the ad hom, I somehow doubt you have any first hand experience of poverty either…..

I somehow doubt you have any first hand experience of poverty either…..

Do you? I’ve been on unemployment benefits (and other welfare benfits) a number of times in my life, including, as it happenbs, right now.

By your own admission, all that’s happened is they’ve been “Liberated” them from one form of dependency to another.

No, by my own admission it liberated them from dependency, because people had accmmodation they could rely on and money they didn’t have to beg for.

I’d rather be reliant on my local vicar who probably knew me and my family all his life than some faceless (and very expensive) dogma driven bureacrat on a job centre plus helpline.

You might think that, but then again you don’t know anything about it, do you? Because you’re never going to be in that position. People who have tend to prefer the route of entitlements, rather than begging, be that either on the streets on on the steps of a charity.

And I wonder….what is a “dogma driven bureaucrat” here? And it what sense are they “very expensive”? Is there any sense in which you have any idea what you’re talking about?

If we’re going to compare hard luck stories I was on benefits for most of the mid 80s, decided I didn’t like it (or got older and stopped seeing it as one long responsibility free party) and did something about it. What did it for me was being visited by a member of the DHSS (DWP in newspeak) who asked me how I did my washing. You are either comfortable with the state in your face or you aren’t. I’m not.

Ok, some definitions:

“Dogma driven bureacrat” as in agent of the state who inculcates the values of the state whenther conscious of it or not.

“Very expensive” as in the welfare state costs money, billions, and is hugely expensive to administer – i.e money that could be spent on welfare payments is instead spend on administering the system. Even it’s most ardent supporters will concede this is a problem

“Entitlement” vs begging – no offence but to me “entitlement” is just institutionalised, state sanctioned begging. At the end of the day you are still asking someone for money, can’t see that it matters who it is, if you perceive begging as demeaning it’s still demeaning.

“because people had accmmodation they could rely on and money they didn’t have to beg for”.

Hmmm. The house I live in was once provided for employees of the local factory, free, for life. Tied cottages were the same, churches and philanthropists built what would now be called social housing. Most of the poorest people stayed in the home of the extended family for life, it’s only (largely left wing) social policy that has driven current, unsustainable, demand for social housing. Many people who can’t get social housing would diagree that it’s “reliable”.

I’m not decrying welfare per se. I just question the assumption that the state is effective at delivering it.

George V – great post. Don’t agree with every bit of it, but there’s a good point to that.

Happy to hear what this new progressive consensus should be though. Any ideas folks?

The house I live in was once provided for employees of the local factory, free, for life. Tied cottages were the same, churches and philanthropists built what would now be called social housing. Most of the poorest people stayed in the home of the extended family for life

Gawd, tied cottages. You do know that they were notorious, don’t you? That people were often thrown out of their homes for disagreeing with the landlord, for going on strike, for ceasing to be economically productive, for – in much of Scotland – being human rather than being sheep? You think that tied cottages were like some sort of big extended family arrangement?

At the end of the day you are still asking someone for money, can’t see that it matters who it is

Can you not? Can you really not see the difference between claiming what is your legal right and begging? If you can not, given how basic that is, why should anybody think you can see anything more difficult?

Welfare should be based on contributions, as well as entitlements. Universal entitlement to say 2 years of benefits through working life. More than that based on time spent in work, so someone who has worked for 20 years should be entitled to more time out of the workforce than someone who hasn’t. This would enable welfare payments to be higher, but paid to fewer people. Sabatticals for parenthood/ bumming around the med for everyone at mid career !

Housing – Personally I’m in favour of putting money in peoples pockets via higher tax thresholds and letting them make their own housing choices. This could mean a better match between “need” and provision and would dicourage dysfuntional behaviour by developers and property owners (e.g empty housing)

Child poverty. It’s quite obvious that one of the reasons child poverty has not reduced in proprtion to money spent on it is that a lot of the money is not spent, by parents, on things that alleviate child poverty. “Controversial” measures here might include vouchers or the direct provision of whatever is deemed to alleviate poverty rather than cash to parents.

Tax credits. Abolish, replace with tax breaks if in work and welfare adjustments if not. Even if you agree with the aim of them, tax credits are an expensive and inefficient way to redistribute. Rather than taking and then giving back, don’t take in the first place

“awd, tied cottages. You do know that they were notorious, don’t you?”

Unlike social housing ? how many notorious social housing estates do we have – Easterhouse, Tower hamlets, etc etc. Social housing is not a panacea however you look at it.

You did actually read the comment, didn’t you? You do realise that “notorious” was used there to mean something completely different, to refer to the relationship between tenant and landlord? And you do know – don’t you – that before there was social housing, there were huge areas of our cities that were rather more dangerous and – in your sense – notorious – than the social housing you’re decrying is today? And that this is the case in the large parts of the world today where welfare benefits and social housing are not available?

Incidentally, can anybody pick any sense out of this:

The state cannot know who is in poverty. Someone on 12k, living at home with their parents is relatively comfortable, a single parent on the same money with 4 kids is not.

What does it mean? What’s it supposed to mean? To what does it relate?

ejh

The Labour party manages to stifle debate outside the party by a number of means:

A media strategy that values effectiveness more highly than honesty. If you don’t think that Campbell was supressing debate by intimidating journalists, tightly controlling access to Ministers and generally throwing his weight around then I am, frankly, surprised. You can argue that the ends may justify the means but I think you would struggle to deny that it happened and continues to do so.

The use of “independent” reviews where complex issues are concerned; followed by highly tendentious references to “the science.” As in, we effectively farm policy formulation out to a supposedly independent commission with a highly selective brief (airports, GM, climate change, Iraq, expenses) the Inquiry returns the anticipated result and then opponents of the new policy can be described as ignoring “the science/evidence”. For example, the state can now wade in, decide whether your children are too fat or not and then label you a bad parent because “the science” tells us that letting your children get fat will kill them (a few years earlier assuming that they stay fat all their lives). It is sort of true but it ignores a central political point that it is arguably more important – that parents (rather than the state) have responsibility for their children. The real debate is not whether mars bars are bad for kids but whether porky kids is a reasonable price to pay for the presumption that parents retain responsibility for their kids. This – you will notice – is not about “the science” at all. You can think that Mars bars are bad and still think that teachers should teach rather than compiling reports on their pupils’ BMI scores and sending them off to social services.

Massive obfuscation in the national accounts. Want to know what the PSBR is? Tough, the off-balance sheet nature of PFI (as well as its complexity) means that we can no longer compare the level of historic borrowing with the current level. So even when Gordon said he was keeping net debt below 40% of GDP, he wasn’t comparing like with like because his gigantic infrastructure improvements were being funnelled into a wasteful delivery model merely to keep them off the books.

Massive fiddling of other statistics. If educational performance is getting better and better, how come we keep falling behind other OECD nations and universities increasingly complain (as they did not hitherto) that their students cannot spell or punctuate? Because they are gaining emotional literacy not taught hitherto or elsewhere? Then why do the poor blighters claim to be so much more miserable than kids elsewhere?

And, finally through the creation of spurious “agendas” like the Child poverty agenda which confuse objectives with outcomes. The government announces a set of policies to combat child poverty and calls it the poverty agenda. Presto! Anyone who wants to attack the policies for being rubbish policies can be attacked on the basis that, because they are opposed to the “poverty agenda” they must be in favour of child poverty. If you haven’t seen that one done about a million times then you haven’t been paying attention.

For an example, look no further than the crapulous bilge about how the Tories want to make cuts in the middle of a recession in order to provide tax breaks for millionaires. You will recall that the basis of this is the Tories proposed change to the Death Duties threshold – a policy which Labour rushed to emulate as soon as it was announced and whose cost runs to the, ooh tens of millions. This is now being used by the Government to avoid answering questions about its determination to keep raising “investment” at a time when it is borrowing 25p in every single pound it spends.

Does that answer the question?

“Incidentally, can anybody pick any sense out of this:

The state cannot know who is in poverty. Someone on 12k, living at home with their parents is relatively comfortable, a single parent on the same money with 4 kids is not.

What does it mean? What’s it supposed to mean? To what does it relate?”

What I’m trying to say is; Universal welfare entitlement depends on people all having the same “needs” which will be met in the same way, and therefore require the same amount of money. Yes, there are some crude discriminators in welfare entitlements (parents get more than non-parents, people over 21 more than people under 21 etc) but the welfare state cannot take account of (which is what I meant by “Know”) the diversity of life situations, there are just too many variables meaning that some people get more than they need and some get less. In management jargon the welfare system is sub-optimal.

“Anyone who wants to attack the policies for being rubbish policies can be attacked on the basis that, because they are opposed to the “poverty agenda” they must be in favour of child poverty. If you haven’t seen that one done about a million times then you haven’t been paying attention.”

Similarly, anyone opposed to the “diversity agenda” must be a paid up member of combat 18……..

ejh: “Poverty was enormously reduced after the war and such things as available housing, national insurance and so on made a huge difference.”

I thought your argument was in favour of eradicating poverty, not just reducing to tolerable levels (whatever that may be, to who’s standards?).

On tied houses, my first political experience I remember was as a 6-yr-old to convince my 80-yr-old neighbour to go and vote for the first time in their life.

Old Sam (that’s what we called him) was afraid that he would be forced into an alms house if he didn’t do as the baronet told him and vote Labour(!) (Yeah, I know, feudalism in the twentieth century). I precociously told him he could always lie if he was asked how he voted and because it was a secret they could never prove what he had actually decided. I saw him an hour or so later and he was handing out ice-creams door-to-door with a big smile on his face encouraging everyone else in the village to go out and vote too.

Thanks for the excellent post George V, I finally understand a few things and I wonder which aspects Sunny doesn’t agree with?

Matt, you’re wasting your time with ejh, he obviously hasn’t read “The Welfare State We’re In” by James Bartholomew – which explains eloquently what you are trying to tell him.

“Can you really not see the difference between claiming what is your legal right and begging?”

ejh, the above sentance is the exact meaning of the culture of entitlement that people in Britain are so pissed of about. If everyone had to stand up for their legal right to free housing, healthcare and food – who would do any work?

Thomas did you grow up in, like, the 17th Century ?

Don’t be silly, they didn’t have ice cream then.

Or was it some kind of crazy alt-reality steam punk era where tied cottages and ice cream co-existed?

@56 Is there a comic book set in such an area? You are something of an expert on all things geeky after all.

Ah, I’m just a history and tax geek. You want James Graham for comics, Andrew Hickey for both comics and steampunk, Jennie Rigg for general fictional geekiness.

For every geek question, somewhere there is a Liberal Democrat who knows the answer…

And I suppose you’re all electoral reform geeks..

Why is it the party is full of geeks? Are they attracted to the yellow? Geekery aside, the yellow really needs to go… not sure what colour would replace it but it’s just not good.

I don’t mind the yellow, but I am in a minority. Some say the main colour is orange, and yellow is just the secondary, but I think that’s even worse if anything. Ideally, I think we should go the whole hog and adopt gold, but we’d never be able to afford the printing.

Hahaha, I was six in 1983 if that helps, living in deepest Cambridgeshire.

As for the ice-cream it was vanilla (with yellow colouring) – nowadays I’d prefer it without the colouring in a more naturalistic cream colour, with perhaps some chopped nuts, sprinkled chocolate and a golden lemon and honey syrup topping for texture and contrast. Although I do like a bit of rum and raisin now and again.

Maybe the LibDems could go for something similar – artificial colouring and plain vanilla is a bit of a turn-off these days, even if it is the only thing going on a steamy day.